5 Arguments People Need To Stop Using

Look, I love weed. I'm pretty sure it's the only reason I was conceived. However, I find it particularly annoying when people tell me over and over again that you can't get addicted to weed, because of course you can. What people mean to say when they say you can't be addicted to marijuana, is that you can't become chemically dependent on marijuana. You can become addicted to anything. An addiction is basically just something someone does so much that it begins to get in the way of everything else in their lives, and I think we all know someone that's in that situation with weed. They're all in their basements right now, eating fistfuls of Cap'n Crunch and watching Yo Gabba Gabba, instead of, you know, doing stuff with their lives. Weed is great if you can handle it, but sometimes it gets the better of people, and if you're smoking it so much that someone says something about it, you should probably consider that maybe it's time to cut back before you go pointing to technicalities.

Let me start by saying congratulations, because from the sound of it, you're a real freedom fighter, like a Harriet Tubman for the new millennium. That said, two things: First, discrimination is a very complicated issue, so any argument you make about it that's only a sentence long, probably isn't going to be all that valid. Second, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that these "friends" you keep in your back pocket to tote out when you want to make a point about civil rights, aren't as fond of you as you claim to be of them.

I don't want people to think I'm against the First Amendment. It's the reason I can write this, and practice my religion, and it's the reason that my one man show was never shut down, despite the strong public outcry. That said, most of the time I hear people invoke the First Amendment, it's not being used correctly. The First Amendment grants you the right to say what you want, but it does not completely protect you from all consequences of your words, nor does it guarantee you a platform on which to speak. Let me give you an example. It's a little farfetched, but hear me out: Say I were to write something that some people misinterpret as me speaking out against the Second Amendment. If those people were to write that I was an idiot, and my work should be taken down, that would not be an infringement of my First Amendment rights. That would be those people exercising theirs. If what I wrote was perceived as too controversial, and the website I wrote it for took it down, that still wouldn't be a First Amendment issue because I don't have any legal right to being published in the first place, and the website has every right to protect itself from controversy. The First Amendment would only come into play if some government entity tried to censure my article or punish me for what I had written in some way. I mean, it's more complicated than that but people the basic gist is that most of the time when people invoke the First Amendment outside of the courts, they're not so much fighting for their rights as they are being whiney, self-indulgent ass hats. Make sense? Okay good. Whew! Thank God I won't actually have to deal with anything like that. It sounds really stressful...

This paragraph may be a little light on the humor because I already used all my good mass shooting jokes in my one man show. That being said, let's talk guns and stuff. Let me be clear: I'm not saying that people shouldn't argue for their right to bear arms. What I am saying is that if you're going to make that argument, you're going to have to do more than just point to the Second Amendment. This is because the debate going on right now isn't do we have the right to own guns; it's should we have that right. Amendments are not written in stone. If they were, alcohol would still be illegal. We have amendments exactly because the guys who built our government recognized that the needs of our country are constantly changing, and, that being the case, there have been quite a few instances recently (many of which I hilariously reenacted in a certain grossly underrated one man show, that my school's newspaper called "highly offensive" and "full of gratuitous nudity") that suggest that easy access to firearms is no longer in our best interest. Maybe it is. I honestly don't know. I've heard plenty of convincing arguments both for and against more stringent gun control, but people saying "This is how it should be because this is how it's always been" just isn't one of them.

Okay, fine. Maybe I just ran out of stuff to say. Although, to be fair, if you are invoking the Third Amendment it means you either don't know the constitution very well, aren't very good at arguing, or the circumstances of your life are really weird.